Racing Games in 2025; Who's in First?
We're gonna take a look at some games I played this year about racing or betting on races and see who's finishing first and who's lagging behind. #review #racing
For one reason or another, I played a lot of racing-related games in 2025. These games could be about actually racing, or about betting on races. Not every game reviewed here was released in 2025, just something I played this year. I'll have the 3 games that podiumed at the bottom of the list to keep the suspense alive. Without further ado, let's pull the starting gun on this rundown.
11. Magical Athlete
I had not played the original Z-Man version of this game, but have often heard it nostagically referenced as a fun game. I was quite excited when CMKY announced the re-release of this game. On paper, this seemed like a great casual game I could take to public game nights: a silly asymmetric racing game with light rules and a short playtime. What fun!
However, the actual experience of playing was anything but that. The game itself, to put it frankly, is just a roll-and-move with no meat on the bones. The asymmetric characters are wildly unbalanced (not necessarily in their strength, but how “fun” they are to play), and it truly feels like you're just watching the game play itself. The closest experience I can equate Magical Athelete to is Snakes & Ladders, another game where you roll dice, move your figure, and have no other real other influence on the game.
10. Dirt & Dust
What a strange game. Calling it a racing game is almost miscasting it cause despite the theme it doesn't really feel like racing at all. One would think that an indespensible hallmark of a racing game is the competition between yourself and the other racers, yet Dirt & Dust makes racing feel like such a solitary activity. Make no mistake, this is a multiplayer solitaire game and at no point did the other players around the table playing with me feel like they were a part of my game.
I actually do think that if the game was themed differently, I would've held it in higher regard as it's an interesting puzzle game. However, the game being marketed as it is compared to how the game actually plays left me feeling disappointed. That said, I can see someone who plays a lot of solo games loving this game.
9. WIN
Unfortunately for WIN, it's a game that doesn't manage to get out from the shadow casted by its bigger brother, Long Shot: The Dice Game (who's further down this list). Mechanically, the game is good fun, especially for a tiny box game. For people that are looking for a quick little game that plays well as a travel game, this is a solid choice.
However, in almost all other situations, I'd rather play Long Shot over this game as it's just a fundamentally more interesting game.
8. Flamme Rouge
A nice twist on regular racing games where you control two bikers instead of just one, but only your first biker across the finish line determines your placement. Each of your two bikers have their own unique decks which they play from, and the decks feature different values. Interplay between players, as well as between your own two bikers, is quite an important aspect of this game as racers can slipstream behind each other which contributes greatly to how well you do overall.
The gameplay feels realistic, and I really appreciate the ease of play as the rules are quite intuitive. At its core, the game is fun, but a little forgettable as it's not all too exciting. I've heard the Peloton expansion adds a lot to the gameplay, but having not played it with the expansion, I can only review the base game.
7. Camel Up
The classic. Instead of playing as the racers, players instead play as gamblers betting on the outcome of a camel race. The game entertains a high player count very easily, while also being very easy to teach. Actions are simple, and the limited number of choices players can make on their turn prevents analysis paralysis. In particular, the 2nd edition of the game adds two wild camels that run backwards to add a tiny bit of chaos during the game.
The only real negative I have to say about Camel Up is that the gameplay is inconsistently fun. I've had amazing games, where the winner comes down to the wire after flip-flopping dozens of times. But I've also had very anticlimactic games where one camel just consistently rolls a little bit better while the others lag behind. Because there are betting odds for riskier but higher payouts, there's just no suspense when one camel is the surefire winner (or loser). A few years back, Camel Up would've undoubtedly ranked higher up but it's since been eclipsed by newer games.
6. Heat: Pedal to the Metal
Certainly one of the best sellers in the past few years, Heat plays very well at its higher player counts, which is a big positive for racing games. While it's easy to table, I find the replayability of the game to be quite low as the Heat mechanic and cardplay are quite one-note and not particularly strategically interesting.
It's important to note that this ranking is for the “advanced” version of the game along with the Heavy Rain and Tunnel Vision expansions. The expansions do add a good bit of replayability, but also add fiddliness to the game, but it's well worth it to keep the game interesting. Just the base game would undeniably be ranked lower on the list as the base game in its simplest form gets played out quite quickly.
5. Cubitos
A bit of an unique game. It's a pool-building game involving dice where the players spend their dice rolls to purchase additional dice from a selection of sentitent dice creatures that give you additional abilities. The push-your-luck element of the game is well-balanced by the creature powers, so it never feels like blind luck despite the game being all about rolling a mountain of dice.
The reason it's not ranked higher though, is because the pacing of the game is a little weird. While the game is not an engine-building game, the nature of how players acquire dice via the pool-building makes the game almost “engine-builder-like”. This means that the gameplay starts off quite slow as players don't have a lot of dice, but ends too quickly towards the end when players have a lot more dice. I love the customizability of your “racer”, but it never feels like you can reach your “grand design” before the race abruptly ends.
4. Long Shot: the Dice Game
Long Shot: the Dice Game is a great racing game that I find being a natural next step from Camel Up. The games offers a bit more decision-making than Camel Up and the game focuses more on the sidebets rather than just straight up which horse wins or loses. In particular, I've found this game lands really well with euro gamers who find the roll-and-write format familiar and not “just luck”.
Granted, this game is a roll-and-write with a racing theme, not just a “racing game” in and of itself. However, the truth of the format is that, like real horse racing, you have no real input on the outcome anyway. Therefore, the idea that the gameplay doesn't just focus on the horses but the going-ons at the racetrack makes a lot of sense as well.
3. Steampunk Rally
A bit of a departure from the other games, Steampunk Rally is a more complex tableau-building and dice management game that's built around the theme of a race in a very “Wacky Races” sort of way. You cobble together your car from pieces you find along the way and try to build an engine whereby you can use and recycle dice effiiciently to get past jumps, hazards, and each other on a track.
As far as racing games go, this is basically my go-to if I want to play a racing game with some meat on it. There's no betting, it's simply a dice manipulation game that both rewards creative and opportunistic uses of the machines you get. Additionally, it plays high-player counts very well. Because much of the game is simultaneous. Each round starts with a card draft, which goes pretty quickly, and then the subsequent round can be mostly played simultaneously which means that playtime doesn't increase substantially at 5+ players.
2. The Fog: Escape From Paradise
This is another twist on a racing game where players are Gods randomly picking their favorite survivors on an island to help them run away from a deadly fog. It's a bit of a puzzle game, as the survivors are trying to get one of the few precious spots on escape boats while they're dodging obstacles and each other.
First impressions of this game is that the theme, while not brand new, isn't seen all too often (compared to something like trading in the Mediterranean) and thus has some natural appeal. Additionally, the rules are pretty straightforward and intutitive, making the game relatively easy to teach. It pretty easy to understand the concept of running forward, pushing other people back, and not trying to run into a tree. The random nature of the game along with the survivor drafting keeps the game replayable and interesting over time as there's no “fixed strategy”.
One thing to be aware of is that this is a game where technically, given enough time, you can always math out the “best” move, which runs a bit contrary to the theme of a murder-fog chasing you. However, in the edition I purchased, the game with two sand-timers which I think are great to force people to take faster turns. After all, making mistakes is half the fun of a game like this which fully addresses this issue.
1. Hot Streak
This is the surprise standout game this year for me. Once again, players are gamblers instead of the racers themselves and you're betting on the outcome of a mascot race.
In a way, this game is exactly what I wished Magical Athlete to be — plus, it's crazy that both these two games are coming from the same publisher in the same year. Instead of asymmetry through racer powers, the asymmetry comes from the deck of cards that determine the racer's movement. You do not play with all the cards in each race, so the different mascots have different “winning potential” in each race.
What really appealed to me about Hot Streak is that the randomness is input randomness. Once the original cards are dealt, the only source of randomness afterwards is the order they appear in. Additionally, players all have the ability to manipulate the input (cards) as players get the ability to choose what cards go into the deck, and which cards stay out in each round, all without the other players' knowing. This means that the “winning potential” of each mascot changes each round based on hidden player input, so there's never a guarantee that a mascot that won last round will also win this one. But on the flip side, players only get a very limited slice of information, so there's still the chaos and unexpected upsets that makes these kinds of games fun.
The theme is hilarious, the box/packaging design is genius, and the table presence is undeniable. It's a game with simple rules that accomodate a high (7-8) player count which makes it easy to bring out. All that combined is why Hot Streak takes the gold for me between all the racing games I've played this year.